Voices in the Silence:Families Left Behind in the Wake of 709
Luna Tian
A Home Without a Voice
It was nearly six o’clock in the evening, and the winter light in Beijing had turned the apartment hallway the color of a faded bruise. In the small living room, a boy in mismatched slippers sat cross-legged on the floor, watching cartoons without much interest. The rice cooker hissed in the kitchen. On the couch, Li Wenzu folded a red scarf — slowly, as if each crease contained a memory.
Her husband, Wang Quanzhang, had been missing for 895 days.
No official notice. No court date. No visit allowed. The last she heard from him was in a text message that read:
“I’ll be home by dinner. Don’t wait up.”
She did anyway.
In the two and a half years since Wang’s disappearance, Li had learned to speak a new language — one made of silence, coded phone calls, and whispered advice from people too afraid to stand beside her. She had learned which neighbors might report her. Which journalists to trust. How to write legal petitions she never expected anyone to read.
Outside their window, the city moved on. But inside, time stood still.
What Was the 709 Crackdown?
On the morning of July 9, 2015, China’s legal community woke up to a silence more chilling than any law could spell out. The arrests began in the early hours, like clockwork. Phones rang unanswered. Office doors were found ajar. Entire law firms were raided without warning.
By the end of that summer, more than 300 human rights lawyers, legal assistants, and activists had been summoned, interrogated, detained, or disappeared. It was the largest coordinated assault on China’s civil society in decades — and it became known simply as the 709 Crackdown, after the date it began.
The targets were not radicals or revolutionaries. They were the country’s own lawyers — many trained by state institutions — who had once believed the law could be a force for justice. People like Wang Yu, one of China’s first female human rights lawyers, who defended feminist activists and religious minorities. Or Li Heping, known for representing Falun Gong practitioners and victims of forced evictions. Or Wang Quanzhang, who had taken on police torture cases, often pro bono.
The official charges were vague but grave:
“Subverting state power.”
A crime punishable by up to life in prison.
State media aired forced confessions. Detainees appeared on television looking dazed, delivering statements about their “crimes” that bore the cadence of scripts. Some wore prison uniforms. Others looked as though they had not slept in weeks.
Behind the scenes, many were held under a policy called
“residential surveillance at a designated location” (RSDL) — a legal black hole where suspects could be detained in secret, without access to lawyers or family, for up to six months. In practice, some were held far longer.
Under RSDL, there were no clocks, no windows, no legal limits on interrogation methods. Detainees were often kept under constant surveillance, sleep-deprived, and psychologically broken. One lawyer later testified to being forced to sit in the same position for over 15 hours a day, hands on knees, facing a blank wall.
This was not just a legal operation. It was a message — sent loud and clear to anyone in China who believed that law could be used against the state, rather than by it.
The Machinery of Disappearance
To call it an arrest would suggest formality, a process. But for many families of the 709 lawyers, what happened felt more like a vanishing.
It usually began with a knock at the door after midnight. Or, more often, the sound of fists pounding until the door gave in. No warrant was shown. Just plainclothes officers — sometimes twenty at a time — sweeping through homes with surgical precision. Computers, phones, even children’s toys were confiscated. The men — it was usually men — were taken wordlessly. In some cases, wives were handcuffed and gagged in front of their children. The message was not just to silence, but to humiliate.
What followed was not a trial. It was a systematic erasure.
China’s use of RSDL turned detention into disappearance. Under this policy, the accused were not sent to formal jails but to “black sites” — unmarked buildings, hotels, or apartments converted into detention facilities. There was no way to verify where someone was being held. Often, families would file a missing person report at the local police station — only to be told their relative had never been taken.
In one documented case, a detained lawyer was kept in a soundproofed room under twenty-four-hour surveillance, with two guards watching him sleep, eat, and use the bathroom. Another described being denied water and forced to sit under harsh lights until he confessed to things he never did.
Legal representation was denied. In rare cases where lawyers were allowed, the government insisted on “government-appointed” counsel — often strangers who had no connection to the case and never consulted with the family.
For the state, this was an elegant strategy: no trials, no transcripts, no outcry.
No body, no protest.
In a small apartment in Tianjin, Bao Longjun, husband of the arrested lawyer Wang Yu, once described it this way:
“It’s like they erased her from the map. My son keeps asking when she’s coming back. I can’t answer, because I don’t know if she’s alive.”
Lives Interrupted: The Families Speak
When Wang Quanzhang was taken in August 2015, his son was just two years old. By 2018, the boy could speak in full sentences — but had no memory of his father’s voice.
Li Wenzu tried to fill the absence with bedtime stories. “Your father is a brave man,” she would say, brushing her son’s hair back from his forehead. “He helps people who have no one else to speak for them.” But the child often stared past her, unconvinced. Once, he asked, “Did he go to the moon?”
Sometimes, it was easier to say yes.
Since Wang’s disappearance, Li had become a reluctant public figure — protesting in front of government buildings, writing petitions, posting updates on WeChat until her account was deleted. In December 2017, she shaved her head in protest and vowed to walk over 100 kilometers from Beijing to Tianjin to demand answers. She wore a white parka and carried a sign with her husband’s name. She didn’t make it far before being forcibly returned home by security agents.
“I don’t care what they do to me,” she said in a recorded message before leaving. “But I want my son to grow up knowing I didn’t stop looking.”
In a cramped walk-up apartment in northern Beijing, Bao Longjun boiled dumplings for dinner while his son scribbled crayon drawings on the kitchen wall. His wife, Wang Yu, was once among China’s most fearless defense lawyers. Now, after being released from RSDL in late 2016 under tight surveillance, she rarely spoke above a whisper.
“They broke something inside her,” Bao said. “She survived, but she’s not the same. It’s like she left a part of herself in that room.”
The family no longer answers unknown calls. Their friends are fewer now. Many stopped visiting, afraid of being implicated. Once, a neighbor asked if Bao still “did politics.” He said no, he was just trying to be a husband again.
Chen Guiqiu, wife of lawyer Xie Yang, had fled to the United States with their children after months of harassment. Before leaving, she had tried everything — appealing to the courts, writing open letters, calling the local bar association. None of it mattered. Xie had confessed to “subversion” on state television — though later, in a secret note smuggled out through a friend, he said he had been tortured: beaten, denied sleep, threatened with death.
“I saw the broadcast,” Chen said. “But I didn’t see my husband. That man looked like him, but his eyes were empty.”
The women who remained — wives, sisters, mothers — formed a quiet sisterhood. They visited one another in secret, shared survival tips: what to pack for a detention visit, which words to avoid online. They knitted scarves together, cooked each other porridge, posted hopeful messages to the void.
“I used to think I was the only one,” Li Wenzu once said. “Now I know we are many — and we are not going away.”
Why They Fought: The Belief in Law
Most of the lawyers targeted in the 709 Crackdown were not born dissidents. They did not plan to challenge the state. In fact, many began their careers within the system, as court-appointed attorneys or employees at state-affiliated firms. They believed, at least at first, in what the law promised.
But the promise was fragile.
It began to crack in courtrooms, in jails, in quiet interviews with the broken and the forgotten. A man tortured into confessing to theft. A woman forced to sign away her farmland for “public interest.” A young Falun Gong practitioner sent to reeducation after a ten-minute hearing. The lawyers didn’t set out to become activists. But when they stood beside their clients and spoke — even softly — they crossed a line the state had drawn in invisible ink.
“The law is not a shield for the powerful,” Li Heping once said in a 2014 lecture.
“It is the voice of the voiceless — or it is nothing at all.”
That belief came at a cost.
Li Heping was abducted from his home in front of his daughter. He was missing for over 500 days. When he resurfaced, he looked thinner, quieter. In a rare interview after his release, he refused to talk about his time in detention. Instead, he quoted a verse from Isaiah:
“He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth.”
Wang Yu, before her own arrest, had once defended students accused of spreading “counter-revolutionary speech.” She believed — perhaps naively — that she could work within the system to change it. “If I don’t defend them,” she once said, “no one else will.”
These lawyers became known as “weiquan” — defenders of rights. Their caseloads included victims of forced evictions, religious minorities, detained journalists, and torture survivors. Some also defended those accused of politically sensitive crimes, including democracy advocates and labor organizers.
To outsiders, it may have looked like political defiance. To them, it was a moral obligation — the natural extension of a legal oath that had not yet been hollowed out by fear.
The Ripple Effects
In the years since July 2015, the 709 crackdown has cast a long and chilling shadow — not only over the families of those detained, but over the entire architecture of civil society in China.
One by one, independent law firms were shuttered. Some were closed by regulators for failing “annual inspections.” Others collapsed under pressure as clients and colleagues vanished. Legal NGOs lost funding, foreign partnerships dried up, and their founders were summoned for “tea” — the euphemism for police interrogations with no formal charge but heavy consequence.
Among lawyers who remained, a new silence settled. Some refused politically sensitive cases. Others left the profession entirely. A few turned inward, choosing to handle real estate or corporate law, where the only risk was boredom.
“The 709 crackdown didn’t just remove a few people,” said a former legal scholar who asked not to be named.
“It removed the idea that law could be used against power.”
That was the point.
The government, under Xi Jinping, was not merely targeting individuals. It was sending a strategic message: the courtroom is not a battleground for justice, but a stage for obedience. Lawyers are not advocates, but facilitators of state power.
And the message worked.
Even for those not directly arrested, the psychological toll was enormous. Families left behind often faced surveillance, job loss, school expulsion for children, and eviction. Some were harassed into silence; others fled abroad. Those who spoke up were punished in more insidious ways: travel bans, frozen bank accounts, unexplained threats at their parents’ homes.
In Guangzhou, one activist who helped the 709 families said he had not slept through the night in two years. “I keep a go-bag by the door,” he said. “Just in case.”
The crackdown also sent tremors through China’s already fragile civil society. NGOs working on gender equality, disability rights, and labor conditions — issues once considered “safe” — began self-censoring. Volunteer networks dissolved. Academics revised their syllabi. Journalists reworded stories. Students stopped asking certain questions.
In the eyes of the state, none of this was censorship. It was “stability maintenance.”
But to those watching closely, it was something else entirely: the quiet erasure of civic imagination.
What Remains in 2018
It is the third winter since the crackdown began, and Beijing is again wrapped in its familiar cold. The streets are orderly, the propaganda posters bright. “Rule of Law Is the Foundation of Harmony,” one declares in blue and gold. But in the homes of those affected by 709, there is another story being written — one not printed in newspapers or approved by the Party.
Some of the detained lawyers have been released, gaunt and watchful. Some have stayed silent. A few have spoken, cautiously, in veiled language. Others — like Wang Quanzhang — remain missing.
His wife, Li Wenzu, continues to wait.
On the morning of January 3rd, 2018, she tied a red ribbon to a tree outside the Supreme People’s Court. It was cold, and her hands trembled, but the knot held. Around her, police officers watched from a distance. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to.
The ribbon fluttered slightly in the wind — a small act of remembrance, soft and defiant.
“They think silence means they’ve won,” she said once, in an interview that was quickly censored.
“But we remember. That’s how we survive.”
In official documents, the 709 crackdown is rarely mentioned. When it is, it is framed as a “successful campaign against subversive elements.” The lawyers are referred to by their case numbers, not by name. Their families are labeled “troublemakers,” their efforts dismissed as “foreign influence.”
But beyond the reach of the censors, beyond the surveillance and the slogans, something else persists.
A son asks about a father he has never met. A wife reads old court transcripts aloud, to keep the voice of justice alive in a house where it once rang clearly. Friends of the detained send postcards that will never be delivered. And sometimes, in moments quiet enough to escape attention, they still believe — not in the system, but in the memory of what the law could have been.
🧷 Epilogue: After the Curtain Falls
As of this writing in January 2018, Wang Quanzhang has not been seen in public for over 880 days. His family has received no official confirmation of his condition or location. Several other lawyers remain under surveillance or informal detention. The international community has issued statements, but consequences have been minimal.
In the eyes of the state, the mission is complete.
But in the hearts of those left behind, it is far from over.